Comprendia was founded in June of 2008, which means we are beginning our 7th year. For this occasion, I’ve decided to reflect about the future of life science digital marketing and I present five predictions which are open to discussion. First, I’ll give a bit of a background. In late May/early June 2008, I was finishing up with the Comprendia logo and forming the LLC, getting the PO box, trademark, and all the trappings of a new business. I wasn’t sure how to set up the website—I’d used WordPress personally and was familiar with it for blogging, but would the platform be suitable for a corporate website? Believe it or not, few companies were using WordPress at that time, but I found a few examples and went for it. I caught a very lucky break as the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) convention was in San Diego that June, and they were accepting bloggers. I signed up, blogged, and have covered several conventions since then. Currently Comprendia is working to provide local coverage of the BIO 2014 convention through the San Diego Biotechnology Network (SDBN). In addition, we liaise with biotech companies, their customers, and science communicators in many ways and […]

Like the cobbler who can’t find the time to fix his own shoes, we have not made a major update to our website since our founding in 2008, and we are happy to announce a new design. New features include product and presentation pages, updated resources, and various user interface (UI) upgrades to help you use the site better. We are open to your feedback and requested features. Through the process of implementing some great features to our WordPress backend, updating our content, and in seeing some of the changes we’ve seen to Twitter and Google Reader this week, we’re pensive about the direction of online and social media tools. Below are some thoughts on benefiting from new tools and ideas while mitigating the associated risk. In 2008, WordPress was not often used for company websites, if you can believe it. I had to do a few web searches to find examples of people using it for this purpose. I am very happy with the choice and benefit greatly from the thousands of developers who write themes and plugins. Small companies now have so many opportunities to develop web applications. In 2008 I had a vision of connecting life science […]

We see a lot of conflicting information about the usefulness of social media, both in general and for the life sciences. Some major companies are reporting on its apparent uselessness and there is a lot of angst regarding the business models of popular applications such as Facebook. However, at Comprendia we see that many more companies are having ‘aha’ moments about social and digital media and they’re diving into it. Similar to life science technologies, its popularity is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between favor and disfavor, eventually finding its place. Here are three tenets which will help you understand how to leverage the changes life science social and digital media bring even though the final outcome is not clear. Traditional media is not coming back. No one really knows where the upheaval of traditional media will lead us, in the life sciences or otherwise. We recently covered the 2012 Presidential election where one campaign used new media to create a self-affirming and misleading bubble of isolation, and another effectively leveraged digital tools combined with traditional tactics to reach their audience effectively. Even though we don’t know where the life science social media pendulum will land, we know […]

Perhaps inspired by the accurate 2012 election predictions and winning tactics which were based on demographics, we decided to analyze the life science industry using geographical data from LinkedIn. Using the LinkedIn advertising application, we’ve mapped 3 million U.S. professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices, and their distribution defines geographical life science hubs. While the overall results fit with recent reports ranking the regions, the segmentation of each life science hub sheds light on the characteristics of each area. Every member of LinkedIn must designate an industry and a location. While it is not known how many users designate only their country, my own anecdotal evidence indicates that this is a small minority and that most choose their city. Through the LinkedIn advertising interface (see image on right), we painstakingly tabulated the number of users in each U.S. city who designated their industry as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, or medical devices. These figures, while not perfect, are a good representation of people who are working in the life sciences industry in these regions. The numbers will be dependent upon the utilization of LinkedIn by life science researchers and professionals in a region, and thus may vary. Anecdotally, I have met very […]

Chance Favors The Prepared Network View another webinar from Mary Canady Here’s a presentation I gave at the University of Minnesota about networking, including audio. I got great rapport from the grad students and they are hungry to network! We thought it would be great if companies or organizations sponsored networking events, seems like a win-win for all, and we do it in San Diego successfully. Let us know if you’re interested in holding events in your region!

A recent article from the Huffington Post states that social networks for scientists won’t work because there is no incentive from a career perspective. The piece focuses on ResearchGate and takes a stab at the Economist’s article about the community. Here at Comprendia, we’ve never advocated that Facebook should be recreated for scientists, as there are 700,000+ life science graduates in the US already using the application,* and they are likely already connected there to lab mates and colleagues. Rather, we should broaden our idea of the ‘social network’ to include any online community of scientists, not just those which are similar to Facebook. The value of social networks for scientists lies in faster access to information relevant to their research and the communities that are made more available by new tools. Here are 6 successful examples which can be used to understand scientific social communities. Facebook Pages & LinkedIn Groups. Scientists have used mailing lists and forums for years. Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups are a ‘2.0’ version of them with the benefits of centralization and easier access to participants. Life science companies, most notably Life Technologies, have fostered social networks in the form of Facebook pages centered on […]